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Comment by angelsl | Hacker News Reader

> Also, even if it were true, storing the actual passwords means that you have a single point of failure - if the password storage is compromised the whole thing is compromised.

How is your system different? If I get ahold of your master key, your entire thing is compromised.

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This is true, but on the other hand the master key is never stored anywhere, so your chance of getting hold of it is reduced.

EDIT: as pointed out, no sensible system stores the master password. I do stand by the earlier 'single point of failure' point though. If you store a password vault somewhere and it goes down, or is encrypted by malware, or you lose the ability to access that storage for whatever reason you're stuck.

Isn't this true of 1Password and similar as well? My master key for 1Password isn't stored. That's what I need to enter to unlock my vault.

It's reduced but by how much? For example, 1Password uses PBKDF2 with something like 10k or 100K rounds to encrypt the local vault. If you were looking at ways that could be compromised, is it really likely that you need to worry about an attacker getting a copy and dedicating a lot of expensive hardware to brute-forcing it anywhere near as much as the attacker getting malware on your system which captures those keystrokes?

Except 1Password is also pwnd if an attacker gets mallware on your system? They just snatch the database and record keystrokes when you unlock it.

Any algorithmic pw-manager can be attacked the same way: just record the keystrokes when the master pass phrase is entered. If the attacker has malware on your system, assume all is lost.

That was exactly my point – on something other than iOS/ChromeOS there might be a chance if the attacker manages only a partial compromise[1] but in general it's wise to assume that a compromise will get the master passphrase or could simply read the unencrypted data out of the process memory and take precautions based on that worst-case scenario (e.g. using U2F everywhere it's available).

1. e.g. if the compromised process is sandboxed enough that the secure keyboard input features work or something like the macOS securityd running as a separate user prevents unrestricted access.

You're right, I was wrong. Theres no benefit from that point of view.

My system also uses PBKDF2 with 800K rounds :-)

Keystroke capture is the most scary, but I guess anything that doesn't do 2 factor is going to have trouble there.

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